August 28, 2009

Here's a video of a riot in my old neighborhood, Uptown, whose slogan is "Chicago's Most Entertaining Neighborhood." (It's home to the Riviera and Aragon concert halls.)

This bottle-throwing brouhaha took place at the corner of Sheridan and Leland, two blocks inland from the lakefront at 4700 North, on August 13, 2009 at just after 9 pm. (The audio portion of the video is Not Safe For Work.)

Nobody brought a gun, so this gang fight has a certain old-fashioned West Side Story / Beat It sense of innocence, but commenters say they heard three shots fired the next night.

I used to live six blocks north and one block east. My rule was that no matter how desperately I was searching for a parking place late at night ... never park south of Lawrence (4800 North).

Good rule.

This part of Uptown, south of Lawrence and a little north of Wrigley Field, is in the 46th Ward, overseen since 1987 by Alderwoman Helen Shiller, who had once founded a white auxiliary wing of the Black Panthers. Aldermen have a lot of power over what kind of development happens in their wards. Shiller chose to pack as many poor and dysfunctional people as she could into her otherwise attractive lakefront ward to drive away yuppie voters. The late Mike Royko once said "Shiller's main motive was that she was building a political power base which included as many winos as she could drag to the voting booth."

All through the 1990s, we hoped Mayor Daley's candidates would oust her so we could someday park south of Lawrence (it seemed a humble enough ambition), but Shiller narrowly survived multiple challenges. Finally, after we left Chicago, she and Daley struck a deal and now they are allies. (Here's Shiller's weaselly statement on the riot.)

I'm just so glad the cops didn't get out of their cars or bother, you know, arresting anyone. That would have been racist. Chicago, the latest American city to be slowly liberated from civilization. Diversity is our strength.

The video isn't all that interesting. Everyone I saw in it (I did not watch until the end) was black, with the exception of the cop driving the police cruiser, who did not get out of the car (smart move probably).

I was in Berlin for the (just concluded) World Track and Field Championships, and Chicago had a booth setup at the front of the stadium to promote their bid to host the 2016 Olympics (seizing every opportunity I guess). I thought 'OK, I guess they could pull it off, perhaps as well as any other city'. Still, so much of the city is just a shithole. But what large US city does not have a ghetto? I was in Springfield, IL -- a fairly small city -- a while ago to visit Lincoln's tomb. And driving around a bit I was surprised to see that even one part of Springfield seemed pretty rundown, with a lot of blacks on the street.

Let's not criticize the cops for using their cars to cut the herd -- that's a park ranger technique. Urban blacks have been given protected wildlife status, so using force or harsh methods against them is a last resort. As long as no campers are devoured, the cops are pretty much limited to just clearing out the campgrounds and pretending that nothing happened.

I used to live directly north of Uptown in Edgewater (6200 N). Anybody foolish enough to subscribe to the "Diversity is Strength" notion only needs to live in Uptown for a few weeks, what a multicultural dump. I think this is a sign of things to come. We are headed for serious urban riots on par with the 1960's. National, state, and local finances are in such critical condition that welfare programs will have to be cut. When you see how savagely the urban poor act when fully clothed, fed, and housed imagine when the spigot gets shut off. The leadership in Chicago is not just incompetent but criminal. Chicago has the highest sales tax rate in the nation. Daley doesn't seem to care if the whole city sinks as long as he gets the Olympics. I'm glad I don't live there anymore.

"My office spends more time and resource fighting crime and violence than dealing with any other issue. My staff and I regularly exchange information with the 20th and 23rd District police regarding potentially dangerous situations and how to prevent violence or crime from occurring. And today crime and violence in the 23rd and 20th police districts is among the lowest in Chicago. But don’t take my word for it. Check it out at www.chicagopolice.org. Whether you search by district, ward and/or individual beat – you will find this to be true. This is a great accomplishment within a community as diverse as the 46th Ward, and the credit goes to our residents and the leadership of our police commanders."

So she admits that having a low crime rate in a "diverse" area is a real accomplishment.

A few weeks ago I posted here about Austin, Texas . . . this is nothing compared to what you would find on Sixth Street virtually any night of the week in Austin, Texas. A few years ago, one night in June, a real mob of blacks beat a Mexican day laborer to death during the ridiculous "Juneteenth" celebration.

Nobody in Austin goes down to Sixth Street much anymore. It's really declined in the last few years - since about, oh, say, late summer 2005. There's a lot more seemingly lower class, "street" looking blacks that hang out there there now, flotsam and detritus washed in to Austin from the "hurricane hub" state plan, Katrina through Ike.

Do you know that the stretch of Sheridan near the Indian Hill club is the richest neighborhood in the USA away from the coasts? Check it out next time you are in the area - even post crash they are selling homes there for 6 million each

The overall story in Chicago is of gentrification - even South of the Loop you see new super luxury condos going up

Uptown is getting gentrified these days along with much of Chicago. I see fewer blacks when I walk around the city. I guess they are either being pushed inland or out to the southern suburbs.

And a lot farther than that. People in Madison, for example, are getting to learn to love ex-Chicagoan criminals. You might have heard Madison topped "best place to live" lists in the 90s. These days it's leaving the top 100.

Part of Daley's master plan to improve Chicago is to drive away as many ghetto dwellers out of the city as he can. Largely they end up in the small to medium-sized cities scattered throughout the rest of Illinois: Peoria, Champaign-Urbana, Decauter, Springfield and others, and once there, the ghetto reestablishes itself. Downstate residents are not amused at this development.

"Part of Daley's master plan to improve Chicago is to drive away as many ghetto dwellers out of the city as he can. Largely they end up in the small to medium-sized cities scattered throughout the rest of Illinois: Peoria, Champaign-Urbana"

Yeah, I know some people who have been driven out of Champagne-Urbana, home of the U. of Illinois, in the last few years because of all children of the new Section 8 renters who used to be in lakefront public housing in Chicago that has been torn down.

"Part of Daley's master plan to improve Chicago is to drive away as many ghetto dwellers out of the city as he can. Largely they end up in the small to medium-sized cities scattered throughout the rest of Illinois: Peoria, Champaign-Urbana"

This is very similar to what's been happening in New York in the last 20 years. Steve has commented in the past on ghetto crime in the Poconos (the furthest NY suburbs). Cities in CT have gone downhill as well. During the same time the murder rate in NYC itself fell from 30 per 100,000 living per year in 1991 to about 5 per 100,000 living per year so far in 2009. That's a 6-fold decline.

Gentrification is a nation-wide thing. Its mechanics are clear to me, but its underlying cause isn't. Impressionable suburban kids are brainwashed by the culture to believe that urban, "edgy" living is cool and that the suburbs are boring. They move to the cities, which raises real estate prices there, which pushes out some of the ghetto dwellers from the cities into the cheaper suburbs.

But the media has been portraying the suburbs as boring for as long as the suburbs have existed. Yet gentrification is a pretty recent phenomenon. What changed? Why are SWPL kids of the 2000s more responsive to that particular media message than were the SWPL kids of the 80s?

Do you know that the stretch of Sheridan near the Indian Hill club is the richest neighborhood in the USA away from the coasts? Check it out next time you are in the area - even post crash they are selling homes there for 6 million each

Who would have thought that the country club that lead to Caddy Shack would be near rich people?

Sorry Melkyn, we didn't have slaves in Canada, but we DO have blacks. We foolishly let them in by the plane load in the 70's and 80's, mostly from those wonderful places that are Haiti and Jamaica. Now, Canada's main cities are graced with their own ghettos (Montreal-Nord in Montreal, Jane and Finch in Toronto). Helped by Canada's generous social system, they are busy multiplying and 'diversifying' us by, among other, doubling those cities' crime rate

A couple of years ago, I naively came really, really close to signing a lease on a new condo at Wilson and Broadway. Great price, high ceilings, granite countertops, the agent was going to give me a great deal, and was pressuring me to sign, but I told him my wife needed to see it and she was en route. While we waited, I needed to get something out of my car and decided to take a quick stroll around the neighborhood. Within a minute I realized I was walking around a psych ward…In addition to the mentally ill homeless, there seemed to be a large pop of African immigrants and thuggy American blacks. We ended up renting in one of Chicago’s less glamorously named (but safe) neighborhoods of North Center (Lincoln/Irving Park).

The generally excellent quality of the prose also jibes with a point which was made repeatedly at iSteve during the Gates scandal, e.g. here:

Sorry Darwin, but the oft-repeated stereotype of the low-brow, slack-jawed cop may work for Hollywood, but it's not the current reality. I work in law enforcement in Washington, DC, and haven't met very many officers without advanced degrees in quite some time. Plenty of educated college grads and officer corps retirees join law enforcement's ranks. You simply CANNOT be an uneducated simpleton in today's day and age of litigiousness. Sure there are dumb cops, but they either get weeded out in the academy or relegated to harmless positions (think affirmative action hires - the very ones who would be the dangerous sort you decry) outside the public purview. No one can be a dumb cop and survive very long these days.

I see that the Cabrini Green residents have moved. Courtesy of the federal gubmnt, Cabrini Green coming soon to a neighborhood near you. So that all the USSofA citizens will enjoy more diversity. That gubmnt, always thinking of us.

Tom Regan said... I'm just so glad the cops didn't get out of their cars or bother, you know, arresting anyone. That would have been racist.Chicago, the latest American city to be slowly liberated from civilization. Diversity is our strength.

"My office spends more time and resource fighting crime and violence than dealing with any other issue. My staff and I regularly exchange information with the 20th and 23rd District police regarding potentially dangerous situations and how to prevent violence or crime from occurring. And today crime and violence in the 23rd and 20th =============

I'd suspect Shiller to give the gangbangers the info she get from the police.

Truth wrote:"Is that the only reason you're glad your country didn't have slaves?"------------------------

No...sorry it came out that way. Of course that is not the only reason. I guess I was just thinking that all these inner city problems, etc., seems like a form of retribution. It is as if white Americans today are being made to pay for the sins that white slave owners committed 150 or 200 years ago.

Barzouf wrote:"...Now, Canada's main cities are graced with their own ghettos (Montreal-Nord in Montreal, Jane and Finch in Toronto). Helped by Canada's generous social system, they are busy multiplying and 'diversifying' us by, among other, doubling those cities' crime rate."-------------------I've heard there is a lot of gun crime in Toronto now--but I guess we (in BC) don't get much news about Montreal. Vancouver doesn't have many blacks, but it has a lot of gang crime now. The south Asians (from Pakistan and India?) are really into it. Mind you most of the south Asian are just regular people--not criminals. But there seems to be a disproportionate number of south Asian gangs. When someone is shot and the name is given, you can tell by the name.

In the smaller city I live in there is a smattering of diversity, but no crime problems associated with it..well, except for First Nations...and that is largely due to drink. Regina and Winnipeg have a lot of First Nations people and a LOT of social problems. If only a cure for addiction could be found the First Nations folks would probably do just fine. But they are never likely to find a cure since the psychologists persist in the fiction that is caused by residential schools. No researcher dares to talk about genetics. There is a ridiculous article condemning "racial profiling" in medicine, in Time magazine now, that was sent around to the GNXP list.

I've got to say--if even half the stuff you guys talk about here is true--I'm really really glad we didn't have slaves in Canada."

You've no idea. Check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channon_Christian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_Massacre

"No...sorry it came out that way. Of course that is not the only reason. I guess I was just thinking that all these inner city problems, etc., seems like a form of retribution. It is as if white Americans today are being made to pay for the sins that white slave owners committed 150 or 200 years ago."

Retribution? Strange, but black people in Haiti, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Congo, and even here in the U.S. seem to be subject to the very same kind of retribution at the hands of other black people.

Is it? I'm not sure when the term "gentrification" came in, but I remember a discussion about young, educated people buying houses in an area of Baltimore that had been down and black, back around 1972. This was a neighborhood not too far from Johns Hopkins University. The local area was a mixture of high end apartment buildings, student housing, and yuppies with families, bordered by "bad" streets. You know, the usual post-WWII urban quilt. Now, 35 years later, I think it's still "gentrified", and now some slummy areas a couple miles away that I never thought would be reclaimed, are being fixed up by young yuppies. As far as the cause, I think some of it is just that people of European (and sometimes Asian) background tend to admire a lot of the urban architecture of the past. These buildings were designed and built by whites, and the original neighborhoods were white, either WASP or ethnic. I've always been a bit drop-jawed at black rhetoric about blacks "building" America. While they have been efficient at deconstructing the urban environment, they most certainly did not play major roles in physically "building" the cities of America, at least not north of the Mason Dixon line. Aside from the residential architecture, the impossibility of teaching blacks to work on high-rise construction (for which American Indians were so famous), is well documented.Still, the slums of Baltimore were due to irresponsible landlords shoving in numbers of blacks migrating up from the South, who could not possibly keep up the property; and then the landlords themselves neglecting the sites. However, as we've seen, even cared-for buildings go down, when occupied by too many welfare recipients and Section 8 housing.

As many of us probably know HAL9000 was created at Champaign-Urbana. At last, the new enriching diversity of Champaign-Urbana could finally make HAL a reality, once all those dull, uncreative white people have been taken out of the picture.

I reject the premise of the question as naive. It's the sort of thing that flows from liberal white supremacy (the idea that, inter alia, all races are just differently-colored white people.); it's the sort of thing whites project onto others, the idea that other races will spontaneously reflect our morality (in this case, a tendency toward altruism) even in the face of opposing stimuli (racial spoils system, racial zeitgeist, etc.).

Is it? I'm not sure when the term "gentrification" came in, but I remember a discussion about young, educated people buying houses in an area of Baltimore that had been down and black, back around 1972.

I grew up in a gentrifying neighborhood in the '80s. From what I hear the part I was in, which was the border (my side of the street white, the opposite side black) is now fully gentrified and the border has moved on.

Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans from NYC have trashed small cities in a huge arc around the city that is further out from what might be termed the suburbs. Northeastern PA, Upstate NY and all of CT have be hit hard by this. My understanding is that most of the blacks in MN, IA and WI are Chicago welfare migrants.

I hope there are still lots of place in Austin with a peaceful environment. This video shouldn't be taken out and be proud of. I even think that Austin dating is a good idea. Well, it still is. Hope these people be calm and make peace with each other.

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